You bend over in order to reach the oven, where the deep pan, the black metal one
with white specks, is heating the choice piece of cod they saved for you in the market.
You shake the pan and show me the bits of garlic melting in the oil and black grease of
the skin.
“Isn't that delicious?” you ask me making that smile like a clown, your eyebrows
arched and your hands immersed in kitchen gloves decorated with a farm motif. You
close the oven door and take me in your arms. “You are going to loooooovvvee it,” you
say against my ear which you then bite.
We’re in your kitchen, the kitchen where you lived when I met you. It is our first
appearance as a couple and I’m nervous. You are not, of course, because it is your
brother and his family, his wife and their small son, and you really want them to meet
me. I, an older woman from the evil empire, divorced and with a child of my own, am
not so sure of being liked. What’s more, I am in your house as your partner, when the
house was yours with another woman who had been your partner and, together with
your brother’s wife, you four were thick as thieves. Forgive the comparison.
I remember you shaking that deep black metal pan with white flecks, the same pan
I’ve used to teach your daughter how to fry red peppers. I haven’t taught her how to
make bacalao al pil-pil, because you made it just that once. It was your special dish, but
you never made it again. We started taking off for holiday houses with barbeque pits
and that was all she wrote for bacalao al pil-pil, the dish your daughter never tried, like
many other things she never got from you. Anyway.
Your brother and his family arrived but, to be honest, I’d have to say they didn’t fill
the room with warmth and happiness. They smiled, they brought a bottle of wine, they
asked after my daughter, but they watched me from the corners of their eyes. You know
why? I’ll tell you why, now that I know. Because they were unbelievably jealous of us.
Of the way you looked at me and the way I made you laugh. Of the way my eyes lit up
when you squeezed my knee or tried to tickle me. Of the heat given off by our held
hands.
And they didn’t eat your bacalao al pil-pil. The kid threw his plate on the floor as
soon as the table was laid out because he didn’t like it and wasn’t gonna eat it. His
mother left the table to clean the floor and punish the boy, lying down with him in the
guest bed, and your brother excused himself because of a stomach ache he’d had since
Friday. You and I dug into your bacalao al pil-pil and you were right. I loved it. But
what I most loved was the way you looked at me every time I brought the fork to my
mouth, as if you were making sure that I really did like it, that my love was real. And,
listen, I can still taste that dish right now, can see the shine in your eyes, that look.
We would have washed up, I guess, although maybe your ex-sister-in-law did the
dishes. We would have made some whiskey-sours and we would have told stories (easy,
innocuous, polite ones) until we began to feel that we were a family again, at least for a
while, and I guess for a while we were, in the way all families are. We would go on
talking about your bacalao al pil-pil and how we would do it again, although today
none of the families there might have been then exist anymore. Your daughter, my
daughter and I exist, as does your pil-pil pan, despite the worn spot which any day now
will succumb to time and rust. When it does I’ll take it out to the terrace with all the
other memento pots and stick a cutting in it to see if it will grow.